Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to acartine/foolery. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/acartine/foolery/main/.agents/skills/knots/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/acartine/fooleryWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/acartine/foolery/knots)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/acartine/foolery/knots"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/acartine/foolery/knots/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/acartine/foolery/knots"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/acartine/foolery/knots.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00054 | $0.00599 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00022 | $0.00240 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00120 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00060 |
Grade A, and why
knots scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Knots
Agent identity
Create or receive a lease before writing workflow metadata:
kno lease create --nickname "<session-name>"
Bind that lease to every claim, creation, advance, note, and handoff-capsule command you run for the session. Agent identity for notes, handoff capsules, state transitions, and gate decisions comes from the bound lease.
Do not copy legacy --*-agentname/model/version identity flags from telemetry
or command history. They are deprecated, ignored by current kno, and can
leave metadata attributed as [unknown <date>] when no lease is bound.
Create a knot
Run:
kno new "<title>" -d "<description>" --lease <lease-id>
Use a short action-oriented title. Write the description with the expected outcome, relevant context, and constraints for the next agent. Add handoff context for the next actor with:
kno update <id> -H "<capsule>" --lease <lease-id>
Execute a knot
Follow this sequence:
kno claim <id> --lease <lease-id>
- If you are working inside a git worktree, run Knots commands as
kno -C <path_to_repo> ...because Knots is installed for the repo root, not the worktree path. - Record the current state from the claim output.
- Use the claim output to determine the current state's completion goals.
- Do the work and validate it.
- If the goals were met, advance with a guarded state check:
kno next <id> --expected-state <current_state> --lease <lease-id>
- If you are blocked, validation fails, or the state's goals were not met, roll back safely:
kno rollback <id> --lease <lease-id>
If the claimed knot lists children, handle the children first:
- Claim each child knot and follow that child prompt to completion.
- When the child knots are handled, evaluate the outcomes.
- If every child advanced, advance the parent.
- If any child rolled back, roll the parent back too.
Do not invent alternate transition workflows. Prefer claim, next, and
rollback over manual state mutation unless the user explicitly asks for it.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 2mo ago First seen · 82 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 9791294bf39f
knots is a skill published in the GitHub repository acartine/foolery (60 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 599 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
knots compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| knotsacartine/foolery | Skill | 60 | 13d ago | MIT | A | 54 | Claude Code, Codex |
| lavra-ceo-reviewroberto-mello/lavra | Skill | 53 | 15d ago | MIT | A | 27 | Claude Code |
| lavra-reviewroberto-mello/lavra | Skill | 53 | 15d ago | MIT | A | 15 | Claude Code |
| dspy-rubyroberto-mello/lavra | Skill | 53 | 15d ago | MIT | A | 35 | Claude Code |
| lavra-brainstormroberto-mello/lavra | Skill | 53 | 15d ago | MIT | A | 15 | Claude Code |
| lavra-eng-reviewroberto-mello/lavra | Skill | 53 | 15d ago | MIT | A | 19 | Claude Code |
| write-documentationDollarDill/beads-superpowers | Skill | 32 | 6d ago | MIT | A | 56 | Claude Code |